Can anyone tell me why, out of all the women in the world, or even London, who would love a career as a TV presenter, Nicky Hambleton-Jones is still at the helm of Channel 4's Ten Years Younger?

The South African dietician-turned-makeover queen (she also has a personal makeover website called tramp2vamp) is the anti-Gok Wan (presenter of C4's How to Look Good Naked), which is to say she is neither warm nor empathetic, and certainly doesn't appear to be much of a woman's woman. Counter-intuitively, H-J isn't tasked with taking the shows contributors' diets in hand, but, despite having the unimaginative and fussily over coordinated dressing-by-numbers fashion sense of Paris Hilton, plays at being a (very bad) stylist.

I watch the programme because the transformations are often astounding - as indeed they should be with the amount of plastic surgery, cosmetic dentistry, hair and make-up on offer - and of course it's cockle-warming to see a 40-something shell-suited mother-of-10 rediscover her groove, but I find Hambleton-Jones's brittle joylessness, patronising lack of people skills and appalling taste in clothes to be wildly off-putting.

Whatever you think about Mr Wan's touchy-feeliness, he always gets a thank you hug from his makeoverees, but I can't recall H-J being hugged by anybody, probably because her body language screams, "For God's sake don't touch me - your frumpiness might be catching".

"In the first series I was a bit nasty," H-J has been quoted as observing, disingenuously, "but that was because I was told to be by the programme-makers. They wanted me to be a kind of school marm. In series two they said I could be myself, so since then I've always been really nice to our contributors, but the vicious label has stuck, and it really annoys me."

This is possibly because, despite her protestations, there was little discernible difference in her approach. Indeed, in the new series, which started last night, she often appears to check herself to stop from flinching with revulsion, but if you're a weathered woman brave enough to step up to the (fashion) plate then frankly I think you deserve to be treated like a goddess long before you look like one. In next week's show, for example, a wrinkled 43-year-old who looks 56 turns out to have a genuinely gorgeous va-va-voom figure - a potentially self-esteem-boosting fact that, intriguingly, barely warrants a mention by Hambleton-Jones. Bitch.